I doubt very much anyone would be exactly eager to make that trade, but these days the long term survival prospects for an AIDS patient are far batter than for some forms of cancer.
Yeah, but if your immune system has already been decimated with chemo... that could be really bad.
Then again, they didn't cover this in detail in my comp. sci degree, so I'm completely unqualified to make authoritative statements on medical issues... or, pretty much anything else for that matter.;-)
So as far as the specifics of this as a treatment, well, as I understand it, they're doing it on cells in a lab so we're pretty far away from doing this to real people yet.
If someone could turn HIV on its head and use it to fight cancer, that would be awesome. I just doubt anybody with the aggressive forms of cancer in question will benefit from this.
I'm having a hard time thinking of something moving at Mach 20 as a "glider"... projectile, maybe, but glider? Really?
I guess, it's un-powered flight, which probably makes it a glider in the same way a bullet is a glider if it had wings.
Of course, we all know that it's gone where it was really aimed and we'll never know the details of the secret mission that this news story is designed to cover up.;-)
Re:Modified, Harmless HIV Used
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
most people with pancreatic cancer would gladly make that trade!
Well, there's some cancers associated with HIV/AIDS which themselves are pretty nasty.
As I recall, HIV was identified because there was a cluster of people with Kaposi's Sarcoma, which was supposed to have a much lower incidence than what they were finding.
If you've been going through cancer treatment, and already have a diminished immune system from the treatment, I'm not sure that's really a trade you'd want to be eager to make.
I'm always glad to hear about potential advances in medicine, but I wouldn't rush right out to try to use this as a cure just yet. They're likely a ways off from that.
[We] conclude that a transmission that weakens a sound computer system -- or, similarly, one that diminishes a plaintiff's ability to use data or a system -- causes damage.
But from the article, it sounds explicitly like this wasn't a "sound" system... it was badly configured, and couldn't keep up with the load put on it. If a court is upholding this as "hacking" then they're unqualified to evaluate this.
Seems like every time someone tries to pass a law related to technology, the law is written so badly as to demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the thing the law is trying to cover.
How could the union possibly know that this would crash the email system?
Has to run as a privileged user... That's the show stopper for me.
WTF? Why do people still write software that requires a privileged user login? You're downloading a chunk of data and performing math on it... what do you need escalated access for?
Am I the only one who thinks programs like this and/or folding@home and/or seti@home should be installed by the manufacture and enabled by default?
Quite possibly... I kind of insist that my manufacturer doesn't decide what I'm going to do with my machines and when.
Those of us with computers in corporate or government environments would not be willing to accept this any more than a keylogger being installed by default.
Haha, I forgot that was you who told me to do that.
As had I until I saw the sig, but it's hard to miss.
but we might actually gain back depth of gameplay as the casual people get out of the console market, and the games for consoles and PC will appeal to both the moderate and hardcore and land somewhere between
Sounds too logical, and ends up with too good of a result for those involved... it'd never work.
I predict simpler games will inundate the consoles, and the PC gamers will be left clutching onto 10 year old titles that they wish someone could make something as good as. Oh, and always on DRM that screws up your experience as much as possible. And in-game advertising. And, maybe some more evil cooked up by Sony for good measure.
That's the business. The business that makes games the hardcore crowd don't like.
Yeah, but if the "business" is making money, then they will continue to not care about what the hardcore crowd likes and don't like, and they'll focus their resources on the titles that make them money. If that's mobile gaming or the next incarnation of the Sims, well, that's where they'll go.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
LOL... I'm glad you followed my suggestion to keep that as your sig... that's just too damned funny.:-P
Do you think Blizzard will wake up one day and say "shit, all my money comes from mobile!" no, because they don't do that. Do you think EA might do that?
I have no idea, and, quite frankly, I'm unaffected by it... I barely game any more, and if I do it's free games on my mobile device. I'm nowhere near the hard-core PC gamer market. I'm pretty sure I haven't played a game by Blizzard in... possibly ever, actually. I think my Tiger Woods on my X-Box is EA, but I'd be hard pressed to name anything else by them.
All I am saying is there is a finite amount of resources to put into game development, and, like any other industry, those resources will be aimed at where companies think they'll see the most profit.
Maybe, but do you know what they will cut? The shovelware. We won't lose the AAA titles, if anything they'll get better as the crap thins out.
Possibly, and you'd more or less expect that. But, having heard people bitching and complaining about it on Slashdot for years... I question if the games makers even can tell the difference between a AAA title and shovelware.
Like the movie industry, if it worked once, the perception is it will work again and again. Corporations see as far as projected revenue, but they're often wrong.
I get the impression that companies don't seem to be able to identify what's going to he a hit, and what's going to be crap. If they could identify the stuff they should have avoided in the first place, don't you think they'd have done so already?
Its better to block out competitors by trolling patents than outcompete them isnt it. god bless american companies..... not.
Well, for starters Samsung is a Korean company.
At this point, I have no idea who sued who first... but Samsung made the components for Apple, and Apple is asserting that in the process, Samsung ripped off their technologies so they could make their own product. (A little googling managed to turn up this timeline -- apparently Apple sued first.)
Sadly, with patents being such a big factor in what products you can make without getting sued (for instance, Android phone makers paying Microsoft)... I don't see how you can have anything but product competition being defined by lawyers and the courts.
Unless you toss the notion of patents altogether, do you have a proposal of how companies will make products with out constantly suing one another? Because quite frankly, as it stands, the patent system pretty much guarantees that your lawyers are more important than your engineers.
Patents exist so that you can avoid having to out-compete, you either get in injunction, or make them pay you an obscene licensing fee per unit that makes it impossible to compete effectively.
When you can get me a cellphone with a 4Kx4K screen, never mind one the size of a twin bed, then I'll think you have a clue about this "future of gaming is mobile" nonsense.
But, really, what fraction of gamers have that kind of setup? 5%? 1%? Less??
You may be so much of a niche that you don't realize it... and the companies making games might decide that trying to make you happy isn't worth it when they can make something more modest that appeals to a much larger share of the market.
You are very much the exception and not the norm -- and if companies decide that chasing the specs you want isn't cost effective, they'll simply stop doing it. I very much suspect that there are people making absolute reams of cash by selling a $2.99 app, and some of the people making big, traditional PC games are taking a bath.
Hopefully people will keep catering to your kind of gaming, but I can see someone deciding they can make a lot more money for a lot less investment by going the mobile/casual route.
God bless all the people out their playing games on their phones and iPads. More power to them. But if the implication is that console and PC gamers are going to give up their platforms of choice for the under-powered processors and AWFUL controls of your typical mobile device, then you need to lay off the crack.
Nobody is thinking that all of the die hard gamers will do that voluntarily.
But... if game companies suddenly find that a huge percentage of their revenue is coming from mobile gaming, they might just decide to shift their focus to what is profitable/popular. If your beloved hard-core titles are attracting an ever shrinking share of the market, you can expect them to attract an ever shrinking amount of resources.
I find it unlikely that segment of gaming would go away entirely, but if suddenly some huge chunk of gaming is on mobile platforms, it's going to get that share of resources and focus by the companies who make games.
The Supreme Court might decide that extortion which is asking for an agreement not to pursue a known legal right--i.e. suing you--is perfectly legal.
Well, if nobody has decided on the merits of the case, but you're immediately providing an offer to settle which is lower than likely legal fees... I fail to see how this is anything but extortion.
What's to stop this lawyer from filing suit against a bunch of people who you have no evidence against whatsoever? In this case, and from TFA:
In this particular case, it was clear that Flagstar did not infringe on the patents in question.... snip...
In addition to finding that Eon-Net filed an objectively baseless infringement action, the district court also determined that Eon-Net filed the lawsuit in bad faith and for an improper purpose... In particular, the district court found that Eon-Net's case against Flagstar had "indicia of extortion" because it was part of Eon-Net's history of filing nearly identical patent infringement complaints against a plethora of diverse defendants, where Eon-Net followed each filing with a demand for a quick settlement at a price far lower than the cost to defend the litigation.
So, this is a completely baseless suit, with an immediate offer to settle, and with NO legal grounds for the suit in the first place.
You may not have read the actual legal case, but seriously, RTFA and you might know why this is happening. These filings were completely meritless, and the offer to settle was intended to exploit the cost of litigation being more than the cost of settling.
This is a case where the lawyer definitely needed to be sanctioned
they (Cooley) are also the ones who make the rating system in the first place. Thus, the issue, and why people are calling BS on cooley (and quite appropriately so).
And, just to be clear... this is a rating system that nobody BUT Cooley is using.
So, a not-so-well-known law school (which isn't considered the second best law school in the US by anybody else) came up with a rating system that makes themselves sound like the second best law school in the country.
Various people called bullshit, and the law school sues... hilariously using lawyers who graduated from other (and perceived as better) law schools.
In the process of suing someone for defaming their reputation, loads of people have now heard about how Cooley made up their own rating system to apply to themselves to make themselves sound like a prestigious law school. Hilarity ensues.
This really is one of the funniest thing I've hear in a while... the Streisand effect, but with universities.:-P
It's like marketing colliding with lawyers... I'm waiting for Cooley to have to admit that their claims were pure puffery and admit they have no legal basis to sue people who presented conflicting statements of fact.
If you want a messaging infrastruture that people can use and not feel like someone is deciding who else in the world is going to listen in, then yes they are overstepping and changing the contract they have with their users. Good luck RIM UK.
This is one of those areas I'd say is getting a little gray.
On the one hand, you don't want RIM handing over information to every petty dictator who wants to suppress democracy -- which, sadly, nowadays includes the bastions of democracy who historically think themselves not in that club.
On the other hand, rioting looting and burning of buildings (and I think a murder) isn't exactly lawful behavior and not necessarily the kind of thing you want to let happen.
I'm pretty sure the contract with their users says they're not here to help you engage in illegal activities. And, if the government shows up with the right legal documents to compel you, the point is moot. But, if the government is there mostly oppressing peaceful demonstrations (Iran, Syria for example) then maybe this isn't a government you should be dealing with anyway.
I'm not sure this falls into an "always this" or "always that" scenario... then again, almost nothing really does despite people's tendencies to do so. Either way, I'm sure this will lead to what people perceive as double standards and hypocrisy.
As technology becomes increasingly something you can look to in order to get this information... I think you'll see this kind of thing happen more often.
For his five downloads of different versions of Cisco IOS â" four of which were launched within a 15-minute period in 2006 â" the government is seeking a penalty of 5 years imprisonment for Adekeye, a $250K fine, and 3 years supervised release.
So, an actual Cisco employee gave him his credentials, he logged into pull down the stuff he needed (and fairly quickly from the looks of it) and someone thinks that's worth 5 years in jail?
Charge the Cisco employee who gave him the password... from the sounds of it, he did exactly what he was given the credentials for.
I don't get this. Are they alleging he illegally accessed the server? Or that he accessed more than he was supposed to?
I certainly remember seeing NCSA Mosaic for the first time.
But I also remember downloading stuff from the usenet alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* newsgroups and needing to edit out the headers, cat them together, and then run the whole thing through uudecode. Good times -- that's partly how I learned vi.;-)
Oh, and of course both UUCP bang path addressing as well as the funky ones we had on the VAXes at school to translate from DECNet or whatever it was... IN% or something before what we'd recognize now as a proper email address.
ftp.sunsite,unc.edu... the ftp repository at White Sands Missile Range
Oooh, and SLIP on a Linux box... that was pretty awesome. There was a lot of "internet" stuff before most anybody knew about the "world wide web". I remember trying to explain it to people in the way back, and getting looked at like I'd gone off my rocker.
Except they've allowed people to have Gmail accounts for years which have pseudonyms... now if they're going to retroactively take those accounts and make them users of Google+ (and thereby say you're violating the TOS) that's going to be a problem for a lot of existing accounts.
I'm not using Google+ (and I have no desire to), but I don't want to be told that my email account I've had for several years has to be closed because it doesn't correspond to my name (I don't know if they're mucking about with existing gmail accounts or not).
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but if your immune system has already been decimated with chemo ... that could be really bad.
Then again, they didn't cover this in detail in my comp. sci degree, so I'm completely unqualified to make authoritative statements on medical issues ... or, pretty much anything else for that matter. ;-)
So as far as the specifics of this as a treatment, well, as I understand it, they're doing it on cells in a lab so we're pretty far away from doing this to real people yet.
If someone could turn HIV on its head and use it to fight cancer, that would be awesome. I just doubt anybody with the aggressive forms of cancer in question will benefit from this.
I'm having a hard time thinking of something moving at Mach 20 as a "glider" ... projectile, maybe, but glider? Really?
I guess, it's un-powered flight, which probably makes it a glider in the same way a bullet is a glider if it had wings.
Of course, we all know that it's gone where it was really aimed and we'll never know the details of the secret mission that this news story is designed to cover up. ;-)
Well, there's some cancers associated with HIV/AIDS which themselves are pretty nasty.
As I recall, HIV was identified because there was a cluster of people with Kaposi's Sarcoma, which was supposed to have a much lower incidence than what they were finding.
If you've been going through cancer treatment, and already have a diminished immune system from the treatment, I'm not sure that's really a trade you'd want to be eager to make.
I'm always glad to hear about potential advances in medicine, but I wouldn't rush right out to try to use this as a cure just yet. They're likely a ways off from that.
But from the article, it sounds explicitly like this wasn't a "sound" system ... it was badly configured, and couldn't keep up with the load put on it. If a court is upholding this as "hacking" then they're unqualified to evaluate this.
Seems like every time someone tries to pass a law related to technology, the law is written so badly as to demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the thing the law is trying to cover.
How could the union possibly know that this would crash the email system?
WTF? Why do people still write software that requires a privileged user login? You're downloading a chunk of data and performing math on it ... what do you need escalated access for?
That's incredibly stupid.
Quite possibly ... I kind of insist that my manufacturer doesn't decide what I'm going to do with my machines and when.
Those of us with computers in corporate or government environments would not be willing to accept this any more than a keylogger being installed by default.
Dude, I've been a vegetarian for over a decade, and I eat a fair amount of beans and legumes ... I know how to make my own.
The idea is to make fart noises without the accompanying gaseous emissions -- it's generally safer for those around me. ;-)
As had I until I saw the sig, but it's hard to miss.
Sounds too logical, and ends up with too good of a result for those involved ... it'd never work.
I predict simpler games will inundate the consoles, and the PC gamers will be left clutching onto 10 year old titles that they wish someone could make something as good as. Oh, and always on DRM that screws up your experience as much as possible. And in-game advertising. And, maybe some more evil cooked up by Sony for good measure.
But ... but ... (butt ... butt ... ;-)
What would I do without farting noises? That's the pinnacle of funny. The acme of funny even. How can you not have farting noises?
Yeah, but if the "business" is making money, then they will continue to not care about what the hardcore crowd likes and don't like, and they'll focus their resources on the titles that make them money. If that's mobile gaming or the next incarnation of the Sims, well, that's where they'll go.
LOL ... I'm glad you followed my suggestion to keep that as your sig ... that's just too damned funny. :-P
So how long before the inevitable application of "Rule 34" to this?
Let's face it, the porn industry has been a leader in adopting technologies for some time now.
I have no idea, and, quite frankly, I'm unaffected by it ... I barely game any more, and if I do it's free games on my mobile device. I'm nowhere near the hard-core PC gamer market. I'm pretty sure I haven't played a game by Blizzard in ... possibly ever, actually. I think my Tiger Woods on my X-Box is EA, but I'd be hard pressed to name anything else by them.
All I am saying is there is a finite amount of resources to put into game development, and, like any other industry, those resources will be aimed at where companies think they'll see the most profit.
Possibly, and you'd more or less expect that. But, having heard people bitching and complaining about it on Slashdot for years ... I question if the games makers even can tell the difference between a AAA title and shovelware.
Like the movie industry, if it worked once, the perception is it will work again and again. Corporations see as far as projected revenue, but they're often wrong.
I get the impression that companies don't seem to be able to identify what's going to he a hit, and what's going to be crap. If they could identify the stuff they should have avoided in the first place, don't you think they'd have done so already?
Well, for starters Samsung is a Korean company.
At this point, I have no idea who sued who first ... but Samsung made the components for Apple, and Apple is asserting that in the process, Samsung ripped off their technologies so they could make their own product. (A little googling managed to turn up this timeline -- apparently Apple sued first.)
Sadly, with patents being such a big factor in what products you can make without getting sued (for instance, Android phone makers paying Microsoft) ... I don't see how you can have anything but product competition being defined by lawyers and the courts.
Unless you toss the notion of patents altogether, do you have a proposal of how companies will make products with out constantly suing one another? Because quite frankly, as it stands, the patent system pretty much guarantees that your lawyers are more important than your engineers.
Patents exist so that you can avoid having to out-compete, you either get in injunction, or make them pay you an obscene licensing fee per unit that makes it impossible to compete effectively.
But, really, what fraction of gamers have that kind of setup? 5%? 1%? Less??
You may be so much of a niche that you don't realize it ... and the companies making games might decide that trying to make you happy isn't worth it when they can make something more modest that appeals to a much larger share of the market.
You are very much the exception and not the norm -- and if companies decide that chasing the specs you want isn't cost effective, they'll simply stop doing it. I very much suspect that there are people making absolute reams of cash by selling a $2.99 app, and some of the people making big, traditional PC games are taking a bath.
Hopefully people will keep catering to your kind of gaming, but I can see someone deciding they can make a lot more money for a lot less investment by going the mobile/casual route.
Nobody is thinking that all of the die hard gamers will do that voluntarily.
But ... if game companies suddenly find that a huge percentage of their revenue is coming from mobile gaming, they might just decide to shift their focus to what is profitable/popular. If your beloved hard-core titles are attracting an ever shrinking share of the market, you can expect them to attract an ever shrinking amount of resources.
I find it unlikely that segment of gaming would go away entirely, but if suddenly some huge chunk of gaming is on mobile platforms, it's going to get that share of resources and focus by the companies who make games.
I assume you're joking ... because, the speed of sound in a vacuum is precisely zero.
Mach is defined relative to the medium you're in based on the current conditions of that medium.
Well, if nobody has decided on the merits of the case, but you're immediately providing an offer to settle which is lower than likely legal fees ... I fail to see how this is anything but extortion.
What's to stop this lawyer from filing suit against a bunch of people who you have no evidence against whatsoever? In this case, and from TFA:
So, this is a completely baseless suit, with an immediate offer to settle, and with NO legal grounds for the suit in the first place.
You may not have read the actual legal case, but seriously, RTFA and you might know why this is happening. These filings were completely meritless, and the offer to settle was intended to exploit the cost of litigation being more than the cost of settling.
This is a case where the lawyer definitely needed to be sanctioned
And, just to be clear ... this is a rating system that nobody BUT Cooley is using.
So, a not-so-well-known law school (which isn't considered the second best law school in the US by anybody else) came up with a rating system that makes themselves sound like the second best law school in the country.
Various people called bullshit, and the law school sues ... hilariously using lawyers who graduated from other (and perceived as better) law schools.
In the process of suing someone for defaming their reputation, loads of people have now heard about how Cooley made up their own rating system to apply to themselves to make themselves sound like a prestigious law school. Hilarity ensues.
This really is one of the funniest thing I've hear in a while ... the Streisand effect, but with universities. :-P
It's like marketing colliding with lawyers ... I'm waiting for Cooley to have to admit that their claims were pure puffery and admit they have no legal basis to sue people who presented conflicting statements of fact.
This is one of those areas I'd say is getting a little gray.
On the one hand, you don't want RIM handing over information to every petty dictator who wants to suppress democracy -- which, sadly, nowadays includes the bastions of democracy who historically think themselves not in that club.
On the other hand, rioting looting and burning of buildings (and I think a murder) isn't exactly lawful behavior and not necessarily the kind of thing you want to let happen.
I'm pretty sure the contract with their users says they're not here to help you engage in illegal activities. And, if the government shows up with the right legal documents to compel you, the point is moot. But, if the government is there mostly oppressing peaceful demonstrations (Iran, Syria for example) then maybe this isn't a government you should be dealing with anyway.
I'm not sure this falls into an "always this" or "always that" scenario ... then again, almost nothing really does despite people's tendencies to do so. Either way, I'm sure this will lead to what people perceive as double standards and hypocrisy.
As technology becomes increasingly something you can look to in order to get this information ... I think you'll see this kind of thing happen more often.
So, an actual Cisco employee gave him his credentials, he logged into pull down the stuff he needed (and fairly quickly from the looks of it) and someone thinks that's worth 5 years in jail?
Charge the Cisco employee who gave him the password ... from the sounds of it, he did exactly what he was given the credentials for.
I don't get this. Are they alleging he illegally accessed the server? Or that he accessed more than he was supposed to?
I certainly remember seeing NCSA Mosaic for the first time.
But I also remember downloading stuff from the usenet alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* newsgroups and needing to edit out the headers, cat them together, and then run the whole thing through uudecode. Good times -- that's partly how I learned vi. ;-)
Oh, and of course both UUCP bang path addressing as well as the funky ones we had on the VAXes at school to translate from DECNet or whatever it was ... IN% or something before what we'd recognize now as a proper email address.
ftp.sunsite,unc.edu ... the ftp repository at White Sands Missile Range
Oooh, and SLIP on a Linux box ... that was pretty awesome. There was a lot of "internet" stuff before most anybody knew about the "world wide web". I remember trying to explain it to people in the way back, and getting looked at like I'd gone off my rocker.
And I didn't even need pants. ;-)
Except they've allowed people to have Gmail accounts for years which have pseudonyms ... now if they're going to retroactively take those accounts and make them users of Google+ (and thereby say you're violating the TOS) that's going to be a problem for a lot of existing accounts.
I'm not using Google+ (and I have no desire to), but I don't want to be told that my email account I've had for several years has to be closed because it doesn't correspond to my name (I don't know if they're mucking about with existing gmail accounts or not).
Wait, we're geeks ... I thought uncomfortable and awkward was our native surroundings. :-P
Oh, sure, one hella is defined as 10^27 ... same for both metric and imperial. ;-)
So, that would be 1000x a yotta damage. :-P
Unless your back garden is enormous, the crater made from an IIS module might change your opinion.
I suspect the impact of something like that would cause one hell of a lot of damage.